What do you do with your Christmas tree when Christmas is over? Thrown away Christmas trees are some of the most frequent items in rubbish collection these days. However, they can have a useful afterlife as chicken, sheep or goat feed. Why not check out where your nearest urban farm is and head there with that discarded fir?

We bought a Christmas tree, fortunately complete with its roots, some five years ago and have carried it indoors in its pot and decorated it for our last few winter festivities. This year we decided to give our fir a well-deserved retirement – it would, otherwise have grown too tall for our living room – and the evergreen has now been re-planted into a welcoming patch of our garden.

Long may our Christmas tree thrive and provide company for our other rather larger fir to the front of our house.

Maybe it might even outlive its senior relative but that, regrettably, will never be for us to know…